Harry Potter and The Jade Dragon

Chapter 18 ~ The Door That Disappeared

The minute Jeanne disappeared, Shan turned to Robert.

"Robert, why'd you do that?" she said reproachfully. "We had a golden opportunity to look at the scrolls, and you threw it away. And you sabotaged poor Chong...now he'll have extra work to do, in addition to our assignments, and you know he's a slow student."

Robert seemed quite unrepentant.

"He loves Astronomy, Shan," he said mildly. "He wanted to do it. And he's the only one among us who's studied ancient Chinese script. If you want to find out what's in the scrolls, we'd have to ask him to help us, anyway."

Shan was not appeased.

"You know you can easily pick up ancient script, like you pick up everything else."

Robert, seeing how cross she was, looked amused.

"Chee Chong is discreet," he said. "I don't see why we can't let him in on the secret."

"Shan, I'm sure we don't mind Chee Chong knowing," said Hermione, taking Robert's side. "Right, Harry?" She looked meaningfully at Harry.

"Er – yeah," said Harry. If it had been Pixie they were talking about, he would have objected, but he didn't really mind telling Chee Chong about Liu Pei's scroll.

Shan still looked rather cross as they started back down the Tower. She fell behind with Harry, letting Hermione and Robert go in front. Robert took several new books out of his bag, and showed them to Hermione.

"He's not really interested in the scrolls," she grumbled, looking at the two in front. Harry saw that Robert had bought a new comic book, Gilbert the Grindylow. "He just wants to have more time to read all his books."

On their way back to the common room, they passed through a corridor lined with rooms used mostly for stores, including the storeroom that Harry had discovered two years ago, the night he'd encountered a werewolf in the Forbidden Forest. He'd never gone back since then, or used the secret passageway that led to the entrance behind the ivy, but every time he happened to pass this way he would always idly glance at the storeroom, and wonder if Jeanne and Lupin still used the passageway to enter the grounds, every full moon.

Today, however, Harry noticed something rather strange. When they reached the place where the storeroom door usually was, it wasn't there. He looked up and down the corridor. It sometimes shifted itself to another part of the corridor, as so many of the doors and windows in Hogwarts did, but this time, it seemed to have vanished altogether.

He stopped for a moment, and Shan, next to him, also came to a halt. "What's the matter?"

Harry looked up and down the corridor again, then continued after Hermione and Robert.

"Nothing, really," he said, still scanning the walls. "I thought there was a storeroom along this corridor, but the door seems to have disappeared."

"It'll probably turn up another day," said Shan, glancing around as well. "I still can't get used to the way everything keeps moving, around here."

She fell silent, after that. Harry shot a glance at her. Since that day by the lake, she had never spoken about her mother's death, and he wondered whether she had gotten over it. When the others were around, she always seemed cheerful, but when she was alone with him or with Robert he would sometimes catch a rather hopeless expression in her eyes, or a despairing look on her face. He also noticed that although she was more outgoing than Robert, she seemed to rely on him for a lot of things, like schoolwork, as if she had no confidence in completing anything by herself.